How to Create & Export GIF in Figma | Using Motion Plugin

welcome back everyone in today's video we'll be looking at how to easily create and export gifs or gifs whatever you call it ride on figma so before i started making this video i sat down and i tried a bunch of plugins related to exporting gifs but most of them needed multiple frames which basically act as an image sequence to create a gif and trust me this was a hectic job which needs a lot of unnecessary manual effort however finally i came across this plug-in called motion by pavel a huge shout out to this guy who has made creating and exporting gifs so much easier with this plugin and guess what it's totally free to use so without wasting any more time let's get started so here we are on figma and just to keep this tutorial quick i'm going to demonstrate a simple loading animation so for that i've got this frame here which has a couple of layers the first one is a plane group which has a rectangle and a vector icon which is the plane icon that you see here and then i have a dotted circle which is just a path so i want this plane to rotate around this path so if you're wondering why i've got this rectangle without any fill or a stroke here that is basically to change the anchor point of this particular icon or a layer so if you've seen my previous videos i've showed you how to change the anchor point of an object in these design tools because none of the design tools like xd sketch or even figma have an option to change the anchor point so if you're new to that i'll just quickly show you how to do that so if i just duplicate this frame here and i'll just remove this rectangle and if i want this plane to go around this part there is no way if i try to rotate it it just rotates here itself and you just can't keep adding keyframes that is going to be a really hectic job and it won't be proper also to change the anchor point you just need to draw a rectangle around this to particular this particular height so make sure that the top here is 26 and even make sure that bottom is 26 so now it's properly in the center and now just remove the fill and group the plane layer and this rectangle here and that's it your anchor point has changed from here to here somewhere around here and if you try to rotate this you'll see that it follows the exact path so that is a simple hack to change the anchor point of any layer on these design tools so deleting this frame and getting back to our original frame here so as i mentioned for this plugin to work you just need one particular frame and you can animate everything so that is the best part about it so just click on the frame and go to your plugins and click on the plugin call motion so if you have not installed it i'll give the link in the description below you can go ahead and install it so just align my frame here i'll just keep this on the bottom so you will be getting a window like this which basically has keyframes and timeline like adobe after effects or something like that and here you have your layers so that is that is in your frame so what we need to do is rotate this particular layer here so just click on that you can click it from here or you can just choose it basically from here so this is a plain group and just click on that here you have different properties that you can animate the position the height and the width the rotation and all these opacity fill and all stuff so what we need is the rotation so i'll just click on the plane path this is the rotation property so just add a keyframe here that you can do by clicking on this particular icon and that will add a keyframe on the timeline so the first one is zero degrees which is perfect and i'll move a couple of seconds forward so maybe like 200 milliseconds and then i'll add another keyframe here and for this keyframe i want it at 90 degrees so i can either rotate it here itself and that will affect here or you can for exact precision you can just double click on the keyframe here and give the value so here i want it as -90 that is perfect and then i'll move a couple of milliseconds forward 200 milliseconds add another keyframe and given the value as minus 180 so you can also add the easing options so if i double click on this you have easing options here but we want it to go in a uniform speed so that is why i'll leave it at linear and i'll just continue this i'll go 200 milliseconds forward add another keyframe and give it as minus 270 and the final one would be the original state so i'll add another keyframe and i'll make this minus 360. so i can just move this playhead here and see how the animation is if you think it's good you can go ahead and play it and the best part is as you can see it runs directly on the frame in figma itself so that is really cool i think this is kind of fast so you can also go and adjust the keyframes by moving it to change the duration so i'll move it a couple of milliseconds here so maybe like 0.3 0.6 and move this to 0.9 and move this to 1.2 and now if i play it yeah this looks kind of smooth and not too fast so i'm happy with this so once you feel the preview is good all you got to do is go to the menu but yeah before that you got to make sure that you're choosing the frame here if you choose the layer and export it it's not going to work properly so make sure that you've chosen the frame here so i click on the frame go to menu go to object there's an option called as export gif so just click on that and you should be able to enter a file name so loading indicator that's good i'll just save it here and it's saved just go to the finder and if i click on this you can see the preview that's a smooth gif animation which is really cool so adding to that just a quick tip on how you can use this on figma to create uh loading indicators so here i've got a couple of screens from the prototype demo file by figma so let's say on click of login i just want to go to the home screen but i want a loading indicator to show in between so what i'll do is i'll just duplicate the screen here place it somewhere here and on click of this i'll just add the particular loading indicator that we just created so there you go i'll just resize it kind of so this is not a perfect example i'm just using this to show a sample or a demo so i'll just place it somewhere here and i'll remove the keyboard in this one or maybe just move it down so that is good so i'll just fade these to 40 opacity and so that only this one is visible and maybe i'll just increase this a bit more so yeah that looks good so now what you can do is just go to prototype tab here and i'll link this button to this screen here which would be a navigate to and have it as a smart animate and from here to the next one that is going to be on delay so after delay say let's say like three seconds or let's keep it five seconds so that we can see it so that is 5000 milliseconds and you just navigate or dissolve to the next screen everything looks good so let's give it a try so i click on this i go to the prototype tab here so here we have the prototype loaded up i'll just click on login and you can see that cool uh loading indicator but that kind of stopped so yeah that is uh because if you go to the export options here and i click on the same plugin that is motion so you got to make sure that your object is in the preference go to export gif and make sure that you have selected the looped option so i click that and let's just export it again i go to object export i'll say new gif i'll go back to the prototype here and we'll replace this with the new gif that we just created so here i have it i'll just place it here i'll remove this one and we'll just replace it in the same position so that looks good so again going back to the prototype i'll just click on preview let's click on login here and there you go it's looping continuously for the delay and here we are on the home screen so that's it for this video guys i hope you found it informative and helpful make sure you check out these other tips and tutorials of figma and other design tools [Music]

Channel: Design Xstream

Views: 50,725

Rating: 4.9688849 out of 5

Keywords: How to Create & Export GIF in Figma using Motion Plugin, how to easily create gif in figma, how to export as gif in figma, how to make a gif animation in figma, how to get gif file from figma, gif for figma prototyping, add gif to figma prototype, how to build a gif in figma, creating gif in figma, exporting gif in figma, easy method to create gif animation, gif animations, simple way to create gif in figma, figma, figma tutorial, figma tricks, figma tips and tricks

Id: hRd0rPbU8-o

Length: 8min 2sec (482 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/notgahan]

Awesome! Thanks for this tutorial

[u/Jonomnom]

Very easy tutorial, thank you!

[u/cedricchase]

Haven’t watched yet, and have no experience with figma- can I ask if this is using a plug-in or is it all functionality built into Figma?

[u/icexuick]

I would really like to export transparant GIF, or better yet, a PNG sequence.
I then have full quality and i can use these PNG's in Photoshop to make my own GIF or MP4.

I've tried multiple motion/animation plugins, but none do transparent GIF or PNG sequences. Anybody an idea? Or where to make this request?